Opinion: Our Electoral Future Remains Unwritten

By John Hood

RALEIGH — The Republican Party enjoyed impressive electoral successes in 2024. Its candidates won the presidency, the U.S. Senate, and (narrowly) the U.S. House, while retaining control of most state governments around the country. For the first time in many decades, more Americans identified as Republicans than as Democrats in preelection polls.

Here in North Carolina, the GOP also posted a solid performance — holding majorities in both houses of the General Assembly and gaining seats on county commissions and the state court of appeals even as it lost the governor’s race (again) and fell to a 5-5 split with Democrats among Council of State executives. As former House Majority Leader Skip Stam points out, there are now more Republican than Democratic judges presiding over North Carolina’s district courts, as well as rough parity on the superior courts. When I began covering state elections in the 1980s, that would have been unthinkable.

As we begin another year of policy and politics, however, it’s important not to jump to the wrong conclusion. The Republican Party hasn’t become a majority party, either in America generally or North Carolina specifically. There is no majority party. Neither is broad enough to win electoral contests on their own. It is the unaffiliated voter, the independent, who picks the winner in a competitive election.

As of mid-December, there are some 2.5 million registered Democrats and 2.4 million registered Republicans in North Carolina. They make up 31% and 30% of the state’s electorate, respectively. Basic arithmetic suggests that the remaining voters — nearly all registered unaffiliated — comprise a plurality and determine electoral outcomes.

Still, such math might mislead. Southern states have long contained large numbers of conservative-leaning voters who are registered Democrats but vote Republican virtually all the time. Indeed, quite a few unaffiliated voters are operationally Ds or Rs in their voting behavior.

That’s not all that’s going on here, however. North Carolina’s mixture of election results simply cannot be explained unless one accepts the presence of voters who split their tickets — who picked Donald Trump for president and Josh Stein for governor, for example, or who chose Democrats for some statewide offices while picking Republicans for offices closer to home.

Post-election polls also confirm the existence of true swing voters. A recently founded organization called the Independent Center conducted a nationwide poll in early December of a thousand registered voters. “In politics today, and regardless of how you are registered,” it asked, “do you consider yourself to be a Democrat, Independent, or Republican?” (The pollster rotated the three choices randomly to ensure a valid outcome.) A follow-up question asked partisans whether they were “strong” or “not so strong” supporters of their party, and asked independents whether they leaned Democrat or Republican.

Strikingly, 31% of American voters said they considered themselves Democrats and 30% said they were Republicans, mirroring North Carolina’s current registration pattern. The two parties differed little in intensity: about a third of each group said their party loyalties were “not so strong.”

As for the rest of the sample, 1% said they were unsure and 38% called themselves Independents, with 8% leaning D, 9% leaning R, and 21% declaring no partisan lean.

The latest Carolina Journal Poll, conducted in mid-November, asked North Carolinians about their voting behavior. Nearly a third said they vote “consistently” for one party. Another 48% said they “generally” support one party but “occasionally select candidates from other parties.” The remaining 20% said they regularly “choose candidates from multiple parties.”

According to these surveys, then, true swing voters comprise about a fifth of the electorate in both North Carolina and the nation. Even if we discount their claims a bit — some partisan voters may want to present themselves as more open-minded than they really are — there remain sound reasons to reject the familiar claim that persuasion is no longer a major factor in American politics, that outcomes are all about which party turns out more of their voters.

The electoral future remains unwritten.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).